We arrived in Manaus well after midnight. I will not bore anybody by discussing why the plane was late. GOL Airlines seems worth avoiding as well. We were met at the airport by some German man — I am not sure I ever heard his name — who drove us to the hotel in a car that fairly reeked of cigarette smoke. But back to the Quality Inn.
If you are traveling to Brazil for business or pleasure, I have only a few words of sage advice to give. One is to avoid the Quality Inn in Manaus. Or at least avoid room 401. The air-conditioner was placed directly opposite the bed and I froze under the flimsy sheet that was the old bed clothing provided.
Completely sleep deprived, we had a wake up call at 7:00 for a 7:30 pick up. We slurped some coffee before we were put in a van by some man who looked like one of Santa’s Brazilian elves. They took us to to the Tropical Hotel, a large resort complex a little out of town. By this time it was raining quite hard. We waited a while for the rain to let up, and then more or less raced with our luggage to the boat moored to a sandy beach.
We were crammed pretty tight on the boat. It began to pour again as the boat left the shore, and the two members of the crew put down the thick plastic shade on both sides of the craft. As it rained harder and harder, they were forced to put down the cover in the front as well, This left the boatman completely unable to see where he was going. The woman in front of me put on her life jacket; perhaps she should have pulled out a rosary, too. Periodically the crew would open the shade slightly and try to figure out where they were and if they were headed in the right direction.
Somehow, owing to either sheer luck or the intercession of the Blessed Mother, we actually made it to our destination, the Ariaú Towers Hotel. It was not quite as wonderful as it looked online.
As it continued to pour, we raced up a rickety flight of stairs grasping our luggage. The hotel is actually a cluster of several “towers”, all on stilts, connected with elevated walkways. Almost all the towers looked like they were about to fall down, and the walkways looked just about as solid as the buildings.
We somehow made it to the reception desk where we had to fill out the usual amount of paperwork. It had some interesting decor
and views of the complex and the surrounding rain forest.
Once the rain had begun to subside a bit, we looked around while we waited for our room. There was kind of a bar area
But mostly what we noticed were the monkeys everywhere! They were on the floors, on their railings,
and sometimes on your shoulder.
Some of the mothers carried their babies.
Can you say, “Aww?” We certainly did for a few minutes. After that, we began to see just how aggressive these creatures were and how dangerous it was to try to walk around with any food.
When we checked in, I asked for a room upgrade. They had Globo, their best little house available, and I decided that if it was going to rain like this for three days — and this is the rainy season — I would much prefer to be up in a tree house with lots of windows and a wraparound deck. In the picture below, you can see it nestled up high in the tree top above the silver roof.
Globo was not available right away, so we stuck our stuff in one of the regular rooms while we had lunch and went off on our first expedition.
Our first trip was to see a local settlement. Our guide was named Francisco. He spoke quite good English and seemed quite knowledgeable. On our way to catch our “motorized canoe,” he pointed out a tree with bark that looked vaguely like a sycamore with with a fruit that looked vaguely like a lime.
This was a rubber tree, and for a time it was the foundation of the entire economy of Brazil. Today only the fruit has any value, used by local fishermen for bait. This was our “canoe.” We boarded on one of the many creeks that fed into the Rio Negro. The river does indeed look quite black, but the smaller waterways are a muddy brown.
Along the way we saw a fair amount of bird life. Herons were everywhere.
We left the inlet and entered the wide, slate gray river.
We noticed a few people living in houseboats on the river.
And more birds, too.
My new camera is fine, but I miss the magnification of the old one. Unfortunately, there is no amazon.com on the Amazon, so I cannot just order a telephoto lens and have it delivered later on the same day. Surprisingly, however, there is pretty a pretty strong cell phone signal everywhere.
The “native village” we saw was actually just the residence of one extended family. Francisco explained that in the Amazon people make a distinction between “native” and “indigenous”. Native people are ethnically and culturally a mixture of pre-Columbian and European people. They speak dialects of Portuguese that combine native words and archaic Portuguese. They live in more modern houses, but in small settlements that are similar to to indigenous villages. These people were definitely native in this sense.
Francisco showed us the root of the cassava plant. Cassava is indigenous to the north of Brazil, but it is now cultivated throughout the world. The root is actually poisonous, but the toxins can be fairly easily removed by soaking after it is crushed into a pulp.
The most common use of the cassava today in the United States is for tapioca, but it is a staple starch in the Amazon and in other places where the Portuguese brought it. Here it was made into a vaguely tasteless pancake which they served to us with far more tasty mango juice.
There is a huge market I think for cassava, but these villagers have found a cash crop: açai. Until we came here I just assumed that this was sort of a generic name for a thick sort of Brazilian smoothie. I learned that açai is actually the fruit of a particular palm tree. This family was cultivating several dozen of them, and one of the boys climbed the tree and cut some down for us.
One of the Brazilians in our group joked he planned to take it back to São Paolo and open a chain of shops.
The family also ran a small “pousada” or guest house for visitors who wanted to live a more native life. I suspect that most of the people staying here were probably German backpacker types.I doubt this would appeal to most Brazilians.
We all watched one of the girls with her dog. The poor animal just seemed to put up with anything this girl did.
After a bit more looking around, we returned to the boat and went back to the Ariaú Towers.
By the time we arrived, Globo was ready. As they moved our luggage over there, we walked down to the shore. We found what had once been the dock for the hotel, but it was now, like so much that was there, pretty much unusable. But it was a lovely evening.
We had a dinner buffet that was pretty much a repeat of what we had had for lunch. I have a feeling that the Ariaú will not be the culinary high point of this trip. There are maybe 25 guests here, and supposedly the hotel once had close to 300 rooms. Francisco told us that most of the towers are not used any more.
After dinner, we went with Francisco in the boat again, this time to look for alligators. We another guide, whose name I never learned, who spotted the alligators and jumped into the mud to pick them up for us.
They had to good sense to avoid the mature specimens and pick up only some of the young ones.
As they walked through the boat with the poor creatures, the little Brazilian girls touched them and shrieked. And a couple minutes, the alligator was returned to the peace and quiet of the riverbank mud. And we likewise went back to the peace and quiet our new little house in the decrepit hotel.
